I've worked for many years with Microsoft technologies and languages and it has provided me and my family with a comfortable living.

I have also worked with Open Source systems (Linux / Apache) and languages (PHP) in my spare time and I find the Open Source community to be very vibrant and exciting due to the huge amount of collaboration that goes on there.

I'm glad to see Microsoft becoming more involved in Open Source initiatives and cross-platform development. I think it's in everybody's best interest and a step in the right direction.

Back in the mid-90's, when the Internet really began to get popular, I learned HTML and JavaScript and VBScript.

HTML, for obvious reasons, and the scripting languages to add interactive capabilities to pages and forms.
JavaScript was mainly only available in the NetScape browser and VBScript was mainly only available in Internet Explorer, so I pretty much had to learn both.

Frameworks like jQuery and Bootstrap didn't exist back then, so I had to spend many grueling hours debugging scripts...

Those of you who started out learning jQuery don't know how lucky you are.

I started out learning DBase III+, then moved on to MS Access. From there I had a brief stint during a project with IBM's DB2/2. I was doing most of my programming in Turbo Pascal while at university and used a DBase library that worked quite well.

I got into programming in Visual Basic while being laid up in hospital and decided to make it my full-time career. (I was previously working as a computer technician, screwing together pc's and installing networks, etc.)

I had my own web hosting company and some of the sites I created and hosted used MySQL.

I was hired as a Visual Basic programmer and started developing with MS SQL Server 6.5. I've been developing and administering every version of SQL Server since then (7.0 / 2000 / 2005 / 2008 / 2008 R2 / 2012 R2 / 2014 / 2016).

In my previous job I had to work with an old version of Oracle: 8i. This was actually a good learning experience to see how different the types of SQL were to each other: T-SQL vs PL/SQL.

I don't doubt the power of Oracle's database system, but my experience has been that MS SQL Server is easier to work with.

I enjoy volleyball, table tennis, pool billiards, darts, board games, playing hacky sack with my daughter (Susi) and Texas Hold-em Poker.

Otherwise, I'm a big Craft Beer advocate and home brewer. Right now I'm enjoying being back in Berlin and getting to know the Craft Beer scene here.

Books:

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Deception Point by Dan Brown
• I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole
• Counterclock World by Philip K. Dick
• ...

Movies:

• The Matrix
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Aliens
• Terminator I & II
• ...